The power she actually held
Margrethe Vestager ran EU competition policy from 2014 to 2024 and, from 2019, the digital executive-vice-president file. A commissioner can prohibit a merger, fine a firm, and propose a regulation. She cannot enact the DMA alone and she cannot stop the General Court from annulling her.
What went wrong, and what is proven
France and Germany wanted a rail champion. She blocked the merger on competition grounds. That is a completed decision. It can be read as protecting customers and as weakening industrial-policy activism.
Some tax-ruling files went badly before they went well. The General Court annulled the Apple Ireland decision in 2020; the Court of Justice restored it in 2024. Years of uncertainty are a governance cost. Qualcomm and other appeals produced mixed scores. DMA duties applied late relative to the political promise of 2019.
She also failed to become Commission President, Danish prime minister, or EIB president. Those are career facts. They are not welfare paths and they are not in the graph.
What improved, and how far
Google Shopping and Google Android are the foundational platform fines. The DMA and DSA are the statutory upgrade. Illumina/GRAIL showed a willingness to unwind a closed deal. Amazon and Meta/Giphy blocks belong on the same side.
The AI Act is Breton-led in the College and still sits in her digital decade. Treating her as sole author would be padding. Treating her as a bystander would be the opposite error.
Shared responsibility, and what the score does not say
The score does not say that Google “lost the internet”. It does not say that every Irish tax ruling was a theft. It does not convert a merger block into a factory. Confidence is high on published decisions, and medium where appeals and behavioural remedies sit between a fine and a consumer-welfare indicator.
Foreign-subsidy screening and GDPR-competition overlaps are supporting paths, not the core. The core remains: can ex-ante platform duties do what a decade of fines could not? DMA probes that call first-wave compliance inadequate are the honest early answer. They are not a finding that the Act is empty. They are a finding that workarounds arrived on time.
Hutchison/O2 in 2016 and the later CK Telecoms judgment are the telecom half of Siemens-Alstom: a block, a court, a higher proof bar. Recording both is not indecision. It is the actual sequence. A competition commissioner who never loses in Luxembourg is a fiction. Vestager lost some and still left a statute that outlives her mandate. Breton’s departure and her own 2024 exit do not unwind those designations. Gatekeepers remain named. That is the test of whether a mandate survived its holder.
Commission press material and EUR-Lex remain the official carriers: the first DMA designations (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 (opens in a new tab)), the Apple App Store decision (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1161 (opens in a new tab)), and Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 as published on EUR-Lex (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/ (opens in a new tab)). Independent contemporaneous reporting sits on Reuters wires cited in the Fact rows.
